Seven Deadly Thorns

Chapter 1 The First Deadly Thorn

THE FIRST DEADLY THORN

Once upon a time, in the winter of war, when the flakes of ash fell like feathers from the bloody sky, the Queen sat in her garden, and from the pitch-black earth burst roses like lesions.

She wept for the death of her kingdom in her garden of roses and ash and pricked her finger on a rose thorn, and three drops of blood fell upon the earth.

Scarlet blood sunk beneath the soil, and she thought to herself, “If only I had a child as dire as ash, as perilous as blood, and as nightmarish as my roses.”

Soon after she had a baby boy. He was sprouted, not born, from the ground where her blood was spilled, and he was as wicked and cursed a thing as the soil that birthed him, with hair as white as ash, a mouth red as blood, and a heart as black as death.

He was called Roze and was viler than any in the Kingdom.